Great article, Sec. Thanks.
To explain today's politics it is tempting to cite the old and excellent joke about feuds among college professors: The fights are so furious because the stakes are so low. ...Yet the joke doesn't really explain Gasket Disease. Bush-haters hate Bush for the least articulable reasons, the visceral kind that never quite rises to the level of rationality. They're often at a loss even to explain who it is they hate--the Yalie plutocrat or the hill-country Bible-thumper? The failed businessman or the cunning Babbitt? The calculating liar or the master of malaprops, the wimp or the caveman, the evil genius or the boob?
THE BUSH-HATERS know they must scramble for more high-minded reasons to explain themselves, and this year's stack of new books is the unpersuasive product of their efforts. Taken together the books make plain, if only inadvertently, that the cause of our most recent outbreak of Gasket Disease is something much deeper than policy, much deeper even than politics, plunging down and down into the mysteries of cultural identity in fractured America. At the end of "Bushwhacked," Molly Ivins speaks for all Bush-haters when, with typical artlessness, she sums up our present state of affairs: "There is something creepy about what is happening here." But they can't quite put their finger on what it is.
LOL. |
